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Comment by DanielBMarkham

17 years ago

I wish I could upvote you ten times.

This is the one thing I really want to see in my lifetime. Habitable extrasolar planets discovered. The more the merrier. I'd like to see hundreds of them within a 100 light-year radius or so. Enough that it hopefully awakens some kind of long-sleeping drive for mankind to explore.

Contact with some sort of intelligent alien life is the stretch goal :)

5 comments

DanielBMarkham

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rms  17 years ago

I'm very curious to see the preliminary Kepler results announced on the 4th, though I think if they actually found any small rocky planets the results would have leaked already.

My timeline is that Kepler has discovered hundreds of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their suns by 2013. This sets off the public imagination and NASA and friends have the funding to design and launch Kepler Mark II around 2017 though with enough funding it could be faster. Maybe 2023 or 2024 is a more realistic timeline for confirming a planet's habitability to >95%.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1014934... refers briefly to a potential type of oxygen, CO2, water, and methane detecting telescope.

As for the stretch goal, maybe Alpha Centauri does have life. If it does have a potentially habitable planet, we are definitely going to know within five years. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_long_shot/

jacquesm  17 years ago

re. the 'stretch' goal:

It all boils down to one question only: how common are the conditions that lead to life? The statistics of that are that we think that if it is possible it will happen. But that doesn't mean that there will be an evolutionary path leading to intelligent life.

Intelligence is not some kind of 'goal' that evolution works towards.

Alien intelligent life could be as alien as Dolphins are, we really can't seem to do much with that other than prove that they are sentient by some arbitrary measure.

  • DanielBMarkham  17 years ago

    I don't agree, but I don't disagree. It may be something evolution works towards, but only in highly-competitive environments?

    I think that's one of the things that would be so profound about contacting some intelligent life. It would start giving us empirical data on all of these questions we currently have: Does life necessarily evolve towards intelligence, what similarities all intelligent life has, does all intelligent life continue evolving towards some sort of machine intelligence, how commonplace is intelligent life, does intelligent life in the universe mimic any of our previous social structures, like liege-serf system, are we currently being isolated on purpose, if so why etc.

    So let's say we find a bunch of planets with carbon-burning industrial societies, but no FTL travel, and nothing beyond that. Is there some sort of limit in place?

    I'm not looking for ET contact to answer any questions, but to begin the asking of a whole lot more interesting questions.

iamwil  17 years ago

Though, imo, not before we figured out some energy efficient technologies. Otherwise, we'd be spacefaring nomads, migrating when we've grazed and razed.